Blood Games (3 page)

They went first to the King and Queen, the most expensive restaurant in town, but found it closed on Sundays. They chose instead Sweet Caroline’s, which occupied a white stuccoed building with a blue-and-gold awning and a wood-shingled roof near the campus of East Carolina University. Sweet Caroline’s had a dark dining room with colorful quilts draped from the ceiling, and advertised a New Orleans-style French cuisine. Bonnie and Lieth both ordered the $11.95 Sunday special, Lieth choosing
suprême du poulet,
Bonnie the beef bordelaise.

Lieth was in a good mood, and they talked about his success with the investments he’d been making and their future now that the children both soon would be in college. Lieth finished most of a carafe of wine as they talked. Perhaps it was the wine, combined with the food and the setting, but something brought out the sweetness in Lieth. He told her something she would cling to later. He would have no life if not for her, he said, as she remembered it later, and no reason to live without her.

They left for home a little before nine.
The Deliberate Stranger,
a two-part TV movie about Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was beginning that night and she wanted to see it. It was already on when they got there. Lieth went straight to bed, but she settled on the cushions of the heavy wood couch in the den to watch it, thumbing through the Sunday newspapers during commercials.

Angela came in just before eleven. She had been home until about nine after returning from horseback riding, then she and Donna had gone out to cruise the mall and the waterfront. She had sort of promised to go out that night with a new boy she had met, but she really didn’t like him much and when he called she had made excuses and called Donna to come over.

“You didn’t leave a note,” she chided her mother, who was now sipping a cup of tea and working on a poster for the Humane Society to display at the Washington Summer Festival on the waterfront the coming weekend.

Her mother laughed and acknowledged her slipup. She had a firm rule about leaving notes on the bulletin board next to the wall telephone in the kitchen so that family members could keep up with one another’s whereabouts. She was always getting onto Angela and Chris about it.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Boring,” said Angela, who went on upstairs to bed.

Her mother stayed downstairs to watch the beginning of the news before switching off the TV and putting her pocketbook away in the cabinet under the built-in microwave, where she kept her “junk,” as she called it, extra pocketbooks, snapshots, doodads, recipes, and whatnot. She looked in on the cats on the back porch, made sure the pet rooster, a by-product of one of Angela’s school science projects, was all right in his covered cage in the utility room off the back porch, then checked the front door to make sure it was locked (she’d checked the back porch door when she came in from dinner) before going to bed.

She could hear music coming from Angela’s room when she got upstairs, and she opened the door to tell Angela good night and to ask her about the whereabouts of some cassette tapes that Angela had borrowed and was supposed to return.

In her own bedroom, she turned on the brass extension lamp on the typewriter table by her side of the bed, and woke her husband, who always slept on the side of the bed nearest the door, to ask if he’d like to have a glass of iced tea or something. He mumbled no, turned over, and went back to sleep.

A dressing table with cosmetics on it stood by the door. She removed her jewelry and put it in a heart-shaped bowl, took a twenty-dollar bill and some change from her pocket, and placed it on the tabletop. Then she undressed, put on a gown, climbed into bed, and reached for a book from the stack of paperback historical romances on the floor beside the bed. She read for a few minutes, but she’d left the bedroom door open, and she still could hear music coming from Angela’s room. She got up, closed the door, returned to bed and read for another twenty or twenty-five minutes without musical intrusion, before drowsiness overtook her. Sometime about midnight, she put down the book, turned off the lamp, and went to sleep

3

Later, she could not be certain whether it was the thud of the first blow striking her husband or his first scream that startled her from sleep.

She only knew that she awoke confused in the darkness, and that her husband’s screams were short and piercing, so loud that they seemed to fill her head. He was trying to sit up, but he couldn’t, and she reached out her left hand to help him, only to feel it deflect a blow. Only then did she see the figure that she later would come to think of as “the shadow.” It stood near the foot of the bed, silhouetted in the wisp of light that filtered through the open bedroom door. A man. She was sure of that, although she could see no distinctive features. He was tall and broad-shouldered, strong, and with no neck at all, or maybe he had a hood on. She couldn’t tell. All was darkness, and without her glasses everything from more than a few feet away was blurred. She could tell that his arms were raised, though, and in his hands he held an object that appeared to be cylindrical, maybe three feet long. He swung it methodically, his aim precise. And he made no sound other than the whoosh of the flailing weapon and the thud when it struck. Each blow brought more screams of terror from her husband. She couldn’t be sure how many times he screamed, ten, fifteen? Nor could she be certain how many blows were struck.

Two blows caught her, then another, sending her reeling from the bed onto the floor. And as she lay there, she heard her husband taking more blows, these different, lighter and followed by sucking, gushing sounds. No longer did he scream.

She made no sounds herself, at least none that she could remember later. Shock, she later decided, was the reason for that, the utter surprise and horror of it all. The force of the blows had stunned her, and as she lay on the floor, she slipped briefly into unconsciousness, only to revive and see the shadow again, this time standing at her feet, arms upraised in the same menacing position. Again she heard the whoosh and remembered no more. Until she heard footsteps, the soft closing of her bedroom door. And she knew that the shadow had gone. She was sure that she heard whoosh sounds again and more thuds, three this time, and she was struck by the awful knowledge that her daughter, sleeping in her room just down the hall, was being attacked and there was nothing that she could do to protect her. Blessedly, unconsciousness again intervened to deliver her from her agony.

She did not know how long she was out, but when she came to again, she realized that she was on the floor. At first she thought she’d had a bad dream and fallen out of bed. But when she reached to get back into bed, she grabbed her husband’s hand, hanging from the side of the mattress, and found it limp and sticky. She recoiled, and a sensation came to her that she later described as “this gushy, yucky, warm feeling that came up on my neck.” She brought her hand to her head and felt a big hole there, and the horror of her situation returned in a rush.

For a few moments she lay still, listening, fearful that the intruder might still be in the house. She was reassured to hear her husband breathing, although it seemed to be growing fainter and fainter. Her own breathing was difficult, and when she tried to get up, she couldn’t. She felt no pain, but she knew that she was gravely injured. Somehow, she realized, she had to get help. The telephone was the obvious answer. Even in the darkness she could tell that her head was at the typewriter stand beside the bed. The telephone was on a filing cabinet to her right, not far away. She angled her head toward it and began to push herself across the carpet with her heels, scooting on her rump.

When she finally got to the filing cabinet, she couldn’t pull herself up to reach the phone. The cord, she thought. She edged herself onto a briefcase, reached between the filing cabinet and the adjoining desk, found the cord, and yanked on it. The heavy phone plopped onto her chest, but again she felt no pain, only gratitude. She grasped it to her and began trying to punch 911, not knowing that there was no 911 emergency line in her county. Her attempts to seek out the right buttons met only with failure, however, and with frustration growing, she lapsed again into unconsciousness.

When she awoke once more, the telephone still on her chest, she told herself to think logically. One button at a time eventually would give her the operator. She began pushing buttons and hanging up when she got a busy signal or some strange noise. Finally, a button produced a ring and the welcome voice of a long-distance operator.

“This is an emergency,” she told the operator. “I need the police and an ambulance.”

Later, she wouldn’t remember the operator’s response, but she would remember the voice of Michelle Sparrow a few moments later, saying, “Beaufort County Central Communications.”

4

As every police car in service in Washington sped northward on Market Street, Michelle Sparrow dialed the number of the Washington Fire Department.

Captain Jerry Lewis answered.

“Captain Lewis, this is Michelle in communications. We have a possible stabbing and beating, one-ten Lawson Road. We have three officers on the way at this time. I can’t give you any more than that right now because the lady can hardly talk.”

“One-ten Lawson Road,” said Lewis.

“One-ten Lawson Road. There may be more than one person injured.”

“Okay we’re rolling.”

“Okay, Bonnie, the rescue’s on the way, too. Okay?” Michelle said into the receiver.

“Yes.”

“But I am not going to hang up until you hear ’em there with you.”

“I don’t hear my husband breathing as fast.”

“Where is your husband, Bonnie?”

“In bed.”

“Can you wake him?”

“I can’t reach him. I’m on the floor.”

“Okay, can you call him?”

“No.”

“Okay, and you don’t know about your daughter?”

“No.”

“Is there anybody else that lives there with you?”

“They’re not at home.”

The voice seemed to be fading again.

“Okay, Bonnie?”

“Huh?”

“You still with me?”

“Yes.”

“Now, look, you hang in there. Don’t, don’t pass out on me, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

Officer Danny Edwards, in the lead car, was going so fast that he almost missed Lawson Road, but he hit his brakes in time to swerve right onto the street when he saw the sign. Tetterton cut beneath him and was the first to arrive at the house, Edwards and Cherry right behind him.

“Okay, ’cause you stay calm and cool like you’re doing,” Michelle was telling Bonnie. “You’re going to help everybody. Where are you in the house?”

The three cars screeched to halts, one behind the other, in front of the two-story house with its steeply pitched roof and narrow, railed front porch.

“Thirty-one, thirty-two, and thirty, ten-twenty-three,” Danny Edwards called to Michelle, reporting their arrival.

“I’m in the bedroom on the right,” Michelle heard from the telephone.

“Ten-four,” she responded to the officers, then spoke again into the phone, asking, “You’re in the what bedroom on the right?”

“Upstairs. The bedrooms are upstairs.”

“She advised she is upstairs,” Michelle relayed to the officers as they bolted from their cars, unsnapping their holstered weapons, and ran toward the darkened house, carrying heavy flashlights and hand radios.

“You take the front, I’ll take the back,” Tetterton called to Edwards.

A short, freckled man with a reddish crewcut that now was graying, Tetterton had been with the police department for twenty-six years, the only veteran among the four officers on duty that night. He thought the intruder might still be in the house, and so did the other officers.

As Edwards went to the front door, Tetterton threaded his way between the four cars parked in the driveway toward a gate in a six-foot-high wooden fence that enclosed the backyard.

“My daughter in bedroom on the left,” the woman told Michelle.

“Your daughter is what, dear?”

“In the bedroom on the left.”

“She advises she’s in the bedroom on the right, her daughter’s in on the left,” Michelle radioed the officers.

“God, I hope this is a bad dream,” Bonnie said.

Tetterton pushed open the backyard gate and shined his heavy Mag-Lite at a recently enclosed back porch lined with windows. The light revealed that the porch door was slightly open, the window beside it broken.

“I’ve got an open door,” he radioed to Edwards, who had just tried the front door and found it locked.

Edwards came off the front porch and told Cherry, who’d been a police officer for only four months, to station himself at the western end of the house where he could see the fence around the backyard as well as the front door.

“Don’t let him get out either way,” he said.

Michelle was asking Bonnie if she could hear the officers.

“Think so.”

“Okay, how can they get in?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know how they can get in?”

“No.”